I think it should be added, for those in the room who are not familiar with this genre of ‘mid-eighties sales meeting inspirational multimedia presentation’, this was most definitely not a video, but a multi-projector extravaganza, transferred to video for posterity (and for those who couldn’t make the sales meeting in person, no doubt).

To truly appreciate this artform, you must read the Multi-Image page at wikipedia, which describes in great detail the long list of effects that could be achieved with this medium, like the Color on Color Slide, the Step and Repeat Slide, the Movement Slide, and the ever mystical Glow Slide.

Be sure to check out the photo of the programming setup for the 1988 Ford Division New Car Announcement Show, featuring the AVL Eagle Genesis computers in foreground. It will blow your mind.

Also fascinating is the list of now long obsolete multi-image hardware suppliers, including Arion, Audio-Visual Laboratories (AVL), Chief Manufacturing Inc, Clearlight, Dataton, Dicomed, Double M Industries, DSC Labs, and Eastman Kodak (projectors), just to name a few!

Audio-Visual Laboratories (AVL), if you don’t recall, was spun off into Eagle Computer, which is also a pretty good read on wikipedia, describing the company’s fate after “IBM launched a multi-party lawsuit against every company that made PC clones, claiming copyright infringement of the BIOS in its machines.”

This presentation was no doubt made with AVL hardware (not by Macs), and as Woid claims on the previous “Jobs as FDR” video, he “…wanted to use Mac graphics to create animated WWII-style maps for the piece… but that was way beyond the capacity of the little 128-K originals.”

To their credit, the Multi-image presentation did have near cinematic resolution when projected on a large panoramic screen. It was certainly cheaper than shooting a 35mm film production, although these multi-image presentations were not cheap either. It would be interesting to find out what the budget was for this, and to convert that figure into today’s dollars. That would probably blow your mind as well.

Oh, and about the spoof on Ghostbusters; these types of presentations were constantly doing spoofs or parodies of major blockbuster movies or action heroes, inserting the local sales reps into the role of superstar. My guess is that this type of roleplay has faded with the invention of YouTube, and the ability of a 13 year old to do a better job at this than a 35 year old middle manager.

This might lead one to comment how corporate videos today have become so, oh, corporate!